Oracle Blog

innovation drives value

Thursday Sep 24, 2009

This large international System Integrator, where today's proofpoint
was carried out, had been using and loving Java as a software language
for the comfort of development and maintenance. When the request to
build some kind of a system and network management application,
involving intensive LAN communication, came from a classified customer, the partner knew the non-deterministic nature of Java SE (though Java 5 and 6 made big improvements in predictability) would
not fit the bill. Indeed, the Java Virtual Machine stops application
threads for garbage collection and other maintenance tasks so it is not
possible to guarantee bounded pauses, especially when the maximal
latency allowed for serving requests in this project was in order of
tens of millisecond (for worst case scenarios).

That said, Java, as a runtime, can take many forms. Expressive Java FX for rich clients, lightweight Java ME for mobile device, transactional Java EE for enterprise services and real-time Java RTS for deterministic applications. Our partner had no previous experience with Java Real Time
but the motivation to stay on Java was so strong that they engaged in a
proof-of-concept to evaluate Java RTS 2.1 on Solaris 10. With the
support of Sun and our ISV Engineering team…

Thursday Jul 02, 2009

GixOO is launching this week its 6rounds video communication service. The coolest web 2.0 venture I have seen in quite some time! As GixOO co-founder and COO Ilan Leibovich puts it, 6rounds is a rich, interactive and personalized video chat platform that takes shared experiences and real-time collaboration to a whole new level. 6rounds combines webcams, social activities, and interactive zones to offer its users an exciting variety of experiences that they enjoy and share together. The video experience present users with broad range of opportunities: from watching videos, playing real-time games, listening to music, co-facebooking or youtubing, to shopping together and beyond. Users are also encouraged to exchange gifts, start webcam effects and use the tips machine which provides ice-breakers and advice about their chat partner.

6rounds is the first product built on the GixOO live social platform, initially developped on the LAMP stack. As a member of the Sun Startup Essentials program, GixOO connected with Sun's ISV Engineering team to test the scalability of their platform on SAMP…

Friday May 08, 2009

Hamburg-based Portrix is providing and hosting the telephony software SmartDialer for a large German call center. SmartDialer is based on a Solaris port of the open-source Asterisk package. The application performs very well on the Sun Fire T2000 chosen for deployment --Solaris outperforms Linux at running Asterisk and Sparc CMT processors are ideally suited for highly multithreaded
applications like Asterisk. In production however, SmartDialer
experienced some stability issues after a couple of days of uptime, and
a very high system time --up to 60%-- was seen on the machine. As a
consequence, the quality of the VoIP
connection dropped to the point that a reboot of the server was
necessary. Oddly, restarting the application alone did not help.

As a member of the Sun Startup Essentials
program, Portrix called upon Sun for additional guidance on the issue;
this is how our ISV Engineering team got involved in this debugging
effort. Unfortunately, there was no adequate load generator for the
Portrix VoIP applications --it would have enabled us to reproduce the
issue on a separate server-- and all analysis had to be done on the
live production system. Quite a scary thought as we know that
traditional debugging/profiling tools attach to the running process and
momentarily stop it, as part of the procedure. In the best case, that
means the call is interrupted for a second or two; in the worst case,
the call is dropped and this was unacceptable to the customer.

Wednesday Jan 14, 2009

Perforce is a commercial source
code management software available on many platforms including Solaris
Sparc and Solaris x86. As one of our ISV partner experienced last year, the storage subsystem is likely the performance bottleneck of a Perforce Server installation.
With entry-level systems featuring a minimum of 4 CPU cores, 4GB memory
and dual GigE network nowadays --I am looking e.g. at the base
configuration of the Sun Fire X2250
server--, CPU, memory and network are no longer bottlenecks. Unless you
run Windows and are subject to the 2GB limit of addressable memory in
Windows --Solaris will, by the way, happily let 32-bit applications
allocate most of the theoretical 4GB of addressable memory, and you can
go beyond that with the 64-bit Perforce Solaris binaries.

So our
partner was experiencing poor performance and blocking situations under
high load (280 users, 16M files, 15 server instances) with Perforce
Server 2006.2 when running off a Sparc V440 server, Solaris 10 and UFS
filesystem --with logging enabled. Benchmark results at the 2003 Perforce User Conference
had already pointed out the low performance of UFS with Perforce, where
synchronous directory updates are a key factor of performance. Linux
performs better because it executes directory updates asynchronously
--at the risk of data loss, of course. Our partner rather wanted to run
off a more reliable Solaris Sparc server --the source code repository
and management system is the number one mission-critical application in
a software house--, tuned the kernel parameter segmap_percent to 80 but that yields very limited gains in Solaris 10. At that point, we offered to test ZFS, the novel filesystem introduced in Solaris 10.